What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.

Beside the road cows are lazily chewing grass. They show zero interest in the runners. They’re too busy eating grass to care about all these whimsical people and their nonsensical activities.

Si mbah ini lucu jg deskripsiin hal hal gapenting

But as I drew near the end of this ultramarathon, I wasn’t really thinking about this. The end of the race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has meaning.

In other words, a mental gap began to develop between me and running. Just like when you lose the initial crazy feeling you have when you fall in love.

I don’t necessarily write down what I’m thinking; it’s just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths. No matter how much I write, though, I never reach a conclusion. And no matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination.

Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about it is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.

And one of the privileges given to those who’ve avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old. The honor of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.

What’s going to be much more meaningful to me now is how much I can enjoy myself,

If you’re a long-distance runner who trains hard every day, your knees are your weak point.

In a race one little mistake is all it takes to cause a massive pileup.

On the body of the bike is written “18 Til I Die,” the name of a Bryan Adams hit. It’s a joke, of course. Being eighteen until you die means you die when you’re eighteen.

LMAO

It’s not my fault—it’s that villain’s.

Lucu bgt dah si mbah

Once you have a scary incident like that, you really take it to heart. In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.

As long as my body allows, I’ll keep on running. Even if my time gets worse, I’ll keep on putting in as much effort—perhaps even more effort—toward my goal of finishing a marathon. I don’t care what others say—that’s just my nature, the way I am. Like

Mantap dedikasinya

I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.

Udh determinasiny kuat, teguh lagi. I adore him in this aspect

I probably shouldn’t be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me. Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself—that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation.

I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it.

And what’s all that supposed to prove? How is this any different from pouring water in an old pan with a tiny hole in the bottom?

Maybe my wife, waiting for me at the finish line, was going to have discovered some awful secrets about me (I suddenly felt like there might actually be some).

WDYM DUDE????

It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself.

Most all the participants have jobs and families, and on top of taking care of these, they swim and bike and run, training very hard, as part of their ordinary routine. Naturally this takes a lot of time and effort. The world, with its commonsensical viewpoint, thinks their lifestyle is peculiar.

Keren bgt emang

I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t disqualified, didn’t get left behind that much, and was able to finish the swim. And whenever I managed to swim in a straight line, I did a decent job of it, I think.

In a triathlon the transition from one event to the next is difficult, and experience counts for everything. Through experience you learn how to compensate for your physical shortcomings. To put it another way, learning from experience is what makes the triathlon so much fun.

But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy?

It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself. If things go well, that is.

Maybe it’s some pointless act like, as I’ve said before, pouring water into an old pan that has a hole in the bottom, but at least the effort you put into it remains. Whether it’s good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what’s most important is what you can’t see but can feel in your heart.

To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts.

Focusing on each stride forward, but at the same time taking a long-range view, scanning the scenery as far ahead as I can. I am, after all, a long-distance runner.

For me, the main goal of exercising is to maintain, and improve, my physical condition in order to keep on writing novels, so if races and training cut into the time I need to write, this would be putting the cart before the horse.